The Scheduling Model and Algorithm for Workforce Management: A case study at KT

In a telco, technicians visit a number of customer sites per appointment. Scheduling these technicians would be easy if there were a small number of assignments to do. However, in most cases, there are an excessive amount of assignments to complete and the number of technicians is not sufficient enough to tackle the challenge. In addition, customers have a variety of needs and each technician has a different skill level, and managers who drive technicians might have different scheduling purposes especially at a large telco like KT. Managers are reported to have difficulty in scheduling due to its complexity. Therefore, an automated scheduler is necessary to schedule technicians efficiently so that the managers do not have to schedule technicians on their own. To do so, we propose four kinds of objective functions and various constraints to model KT’s workforce scheduling case, which are used by the scheduler. We also developed algorithms to find the best possible solution through using the model. The scheduling system is implemented by using the proposed model and algorithms. The result of adopting the implemented scheduling system was successful from both financial and service quality perspectives